IBM, Zend Tighten PHP Partnership

SAN FRANCISCOZend Technologies and IBM are broadening their partnership to further promote the growth of production-ready PHP applications in the enterprise.
At the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo here on Aug. 8, Zend and IBM announced deeper integration between Zend Core for IBM and IBM DB2. With the integration, organizations can now deploy open-source PHP and DB2 across a wide variety of hardware and operating systems and obtain support from a single source, the companies said.
As part of the expanded partnership, Zend and IBM announced enhanced DB2 Express-C capabilities in Zend Core for IBM, the certified PHP solution from Zend, and new support for DB2 Connect technology providing access to scalable i5/OS and z/OS DB2 data servers.

In addition, there will be unified, single-source support for the integrated PHP and DB2 solution stack and support for System i Linux partitions and the System i attached BladeCenter and System x servers.

Zend Core for IBM provides a PHP-based application development and deployment stack, which includes Apache, PHP, Zend Framework and DB2 Express-C.
"Zend Core for IBM is a great solution for customers needing to plan for future growth," said Mark de Visser, chief marketing officer for Zend, based in Cupertino, Calif. "People can start out with an entry-level System x system and later scale their systems to the System p, System i and even System z hardware using the cross-platform consistency of the Zend Core solution."
Shaklee, a natural nutrition company in Pleasanton, Calif., uses PHP in its enterprise environment and has enlisted Zend and IBM to support its PHP infrastructure.

"We depend on Zend Core, Zend Platform and DB2 as key technologies in our Web-based business," said Chris Jones, director of Web applications at Shaklee. "We are encouraged to see this kind of cooperation from Zend and IBM to produce a truly integrated solution and support offering."
Meanwhile, Zend in July announced the availability of Version 1.0 of Zend Framework, an open-source application framework for PHP, which was first unveiled at the annual Zend Conference in October 2005 and prereleased in April 2006.
IBM, headquartered in Armonk, N.Y., uses Zend Framework as the basis for its QEDWiki project, which enables both developers and non-developers to assemble sophisticated Web 2.0 applications by integrating or mashing up Web services.
"By using Zend Frameworks building blocks, we saved ourselves much time and effort in the development of QEDWiki," said David Boloker, chief technology officer for emerging Internet technologies in the IBM Software Group. "From the start, we have embraced and contributed to the project and are excited to now be able to release a production version of QEDWiki based on Zend Framework 1.0."
Click here to read more about Zends moves to boost PHP usage.
Right Media, a New York-based online advertising company, operates the Right Media Exchange, in which advertisers and publishers buy and sell online ad placements in real time through auctions. The company also uses the Zend Framework.
"We were looking for an out-of-the-box MVC [model-view-controller] framework for some time," said Edward Kozek, vice president of product engineering at Right Media. "We realized that building an enterprise-level framework would be challenging, and the fact that this one is built by a large community of developers was a clear win in our eyes."
Also, he said, Right Media developers like the fact that they can contribute to the community.
"Weve been rebuilding our Web applications from the ground up, and are now writing into them the core MVC capabilities of the framework," Kozek said. "We like the way the product enforces a standard, easy-to-understand and sensible hierarchy on our code. Its been a little challenging to keep up with new releases. Wed seen function signatures change as Zend Framework moved closer to a release of Version 1.0, but we assume it will become more stable as it achieves wider acceptance in the market."
The Zend framework is made up of an MVC application framework, database support, internationalization services, Web services and foundation framework services.
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Darryl K. Taft covers the development tools and developer-related issues beat from his office in Baltimore. He has more than 10 years of experience in the business and is always looking for the next scoop. Taft is a member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and was named 'one of the most active middleware reporters in the world' by The Middleware Co. He also has his own card in the 'Who's Who in Enterprise Java' deck.